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Developing personal and professional relationships with staff helps school leaders gain the trust needed to achieve the overall vision of the school or district, writes Scott Taylor, assistant superintendent of New Jersey's Kenilworth Schools. In this blog post, Taylor offers four ways in which leaders can build relationships, including visiting classrooms daily. "The key to building relationships that will strengthen an educational leader's vision is being highly accessible and spending quality time talking and listening to teachers and support staff," he writes.

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Phillip Stone Sr., who is expected to become the new president of Sweet Briar College in Virginia next month, says current faculty and staff are welcome to remain at the school. "My idea is that success has to be based upon growth of the student body and not on how much we can chop from the faculty and staff," Stone said.

Five school-district technology officials in this article share ideas for safeguarding student information and adhering to policies that protect children online. Breaches can occur easily if teachers or staff mistakenly upload protected information to file-sharing services or sign students up for accounts on platforms not in compliance with privacy laws, notes Steve Young, chief technology officer at Judson Independent School District in Texas. "One of the main ways to combat this is through education of staff," he suggests.

Using reflective questions to offer critical feedback can help school leaders achieve the difficult task of critiquing in a non-threatening manner, Scott Taylor, superintendent of Kenilworth Schools in N.J., writes in this blog post. "There is nothing wrong with intrinsically motivating people to think critically about the performance feedback they are given," he writes.

Strategies such as creating multisensory lessons and using text-to-speech technology can make literacy lessons more accessible for students with dyslexia, Sally Bouwman writes in this blog post. Bouwman, a U.K. lead teacher for dyslexia who teaches at ARK Schools in London, notes that her schools screen all 6- and 7-year-olds for dyslexia, and staff are trained to recognize signs of the disorder. "We encourage all our schools to build dyslexia expertise among their staff," she writes.

Some 300 Southern California schools were closed and many transformed into emergency shelters as nearly 1 million people were evacuated from the paths of dozens of wildfires. "We've been exceptionally proud of our staff," said a spokeswoman for San Diego Unified School district. "They're mobilizing and going to evacuation centers to help keep kids engaged."